Research

• Preference Studies
• Habitation Studies
• Recording Study
• Publications & Presentations

Research in our lab is approved by the Psychology/Sociology Research Ethics Board.

Preference Studies

Do infants understand the phonological properties of English?

In English, the vowel before a "voiced" consonant like the /d/ in "bad" is usually longer than the vowel before an "unvoiced" consonant like the /t/ in "bat". We are looking at what infants understand about this property of the language.

What do toddlers understand about the relationships between words in sentences?

One very important part of learning a language is developing an understanding of how the words combine together to form a meaningful sentence. We currently have two studies examining what infants at different ages understand about the relationships between words in sentences.

How does noise affect infants' ability to understand the language they hear?

The language we hear around us is never produced in absolute silence. We are currently looking at how well infants can perceive language that they hear in a noisy environment.

Habituation Studies

How do infants perceive their fathers' voices?

Research in our lab and others suggests that infants don't prefer to listen to their fathers' voices the same way they do their mothers'. We are currently looking at whether infants recognize their father's voice as different from other male voices.

Can young infants tell the difference between different emotional sounds?

In this study, we are looking to see at what age infants begin to tell the difference between different expressions of positive emotion like "excited" and "relieved". Like the questions study above, we do this by playing them sounds from one emotion until they get bored. Then we test to see if they show increased interest to a new emotion they haven't heard yet.

Recording Study

How do the language environments of daycare centres differ from home?

Despite the changes in parental leave laws in Canada in the last decade, many infants are still placed in child care before the age of two. Recent work at the NIH suggests that these early childcare experiences do have important influences on the language and cognitive development of young children. However, we do not yet know very much about the differences (both positive and negative) in language exposure between home care and external child care.

The laboratory is looking to recruit stay-at-home mothers, home-based child care centres and outside-of-home daycare facilities that care for infants and children two years old and under. We will be doing a detailed analysis of the acoustical and language characteristics of each of these environments. The study would involve taking acoustic measurements and recording the speech from adults both among themselves and to the infants/children. If you are interested in learning about how you can participate, please contact the lab for more information.

Publications & Presentations

Bhaskaran, J. (2011, April). Infant detection of natural language dependencies. Honours Thesis Presentation.

Kozak, A. (2011, April). A Paternal Voice Preference: Father Involvement as Part of the Language Environment. Honours Thesis Presentation.

Wittebolle, K. (2011, April). Understanding the Relative Effects of Activity Type and Time of Day on the Language Environment across Child Care Settings. Honours Thesis Presentation.

Soderstrom, M. (2011, March). Effects and Non-effects of Non-maternal Child-care on the Language Environment and Child Vocalizations. Society for Research in Child Development. Montreal, QC.

Soderstrom, M., Ko, E.-S., & Nevzorova, U. (2011). It's a question? Infants attend differently to yes/no questions and declaratives. Infant Behavior and Development, 34, 107-110.
~Copy available on request~

Ko, E.-S., Soderstrom, M., & Morgan, J.L. (2009). Infants' perceptual sensitivity to extrinsic vowel duration in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letter, 126, EL134-EL139.
~This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the Acoustical Society of America.
The official abstract may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?JAS/126/EL134.~

Soderstrom, M., Conwell, E., Feldman, N., & Morgan, J.L. (2009). Statistical learning in language acquisition: Beyond demonstrations, towards a theory. Developmental Science, 12, 409-411.
~Copy available on request~

Soderstrom, M., Blossom, M., Foygel, I., & Morgan, J.L. (2008). Acoustical cues and grammatical units in speech to two preverbal infants. Journal of Child Language, 35, 869-902.

Soderstrom, M. (2008). Early perception-late comprehension? The case of verbal -s (A response to de Villers & Johnson, 2007). Journal of Child Language, 35, 671-676.

Soderstrom, M. & Morgan, J.L. (2007). Twenty-two-month-olds discriminate fluent from disfluent adult-directed speech. Developmental Science, 10, 641-653.
~Copy available on request~

Soderstrom, M., White, K.S., Conwell, E. & Morgan, J.L. (2007). Receptive grammatical knowledge of familiar content words and inflection in 16-month-olds. Infancy, 12, 1-29.
~Please contact Lawrence Earlbaum Associates for permission to reprint this article.~

Soderstrom, M. (2007). Beyond babytalk: Re-evaluating the nature and content of speech input to preverbal infants. Developmental Review, 27, 501-532.

Soderstrom, M., Kemler Nelson, D. G., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2005). Six-month-olds recognize clauses embedded in different passages of fluent speech. Infant Behavior and Development, 28, 87-94.
~Copy available on request~

Soderstrom, M., Seidl, A., Kemler Nelson, D. G., & Jusczyk, P. W. (2003). The prosodic bootstrapping of phrases: Evidence from prelinguistic infants. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 249-267.